Facebook Updates Analytics Dashboard

Businesses -- such as publishers, app developers and page owners -- may view analytics about specific articles or readers.

Facebook Monday released an updated Insights dashboard that digs deeper into users' "likes," shares and reshares, and is designed to deliver enhanced metrics and analytics for owners of Facebook applications, websites, and pages.

The dashboard incorporates fully integrated Web sites and those using social plug-ins or non-integrated domains; applications such as canvas, mobile, device and desktop applications, as well as Facebook pages created on Facebook.com and in Open Graph protocol.

Businesses -- such as publishers, application developers and page owners -- may view analytics about specific articles or readers.

"Note that this is anonymized aggregate data and does not include personally identifiable information," wrote Alex Himel, an engineer of Facebook's platform team, in a company blog. "From there, you will have a better idea of what your audience finds most interesting and capitalize on that content."

The dashboard, which allows developers to see, print and save graphs, also provides demographics visualization so businesses can see data about the audience interacting with their page, application or website. Businesses can break down this data by age, gender, city, country and language, according to Facebook.

Insights now includes referral traffic for applications; feedback for stream stories; a breakdown of which user actions contribute to the active user count; demographics on authorized and active users, and the number of times permissions are prompted and granted.

In addition, those who administer a Facebook Page or who integrate the Open Graph protocol can see analytics for referral traffic and stream stories and tab views for pages in the Insights dashboard.

Administrators must first associate their domain with a user ID, Facebook application or Facebook page by clicking the green "Insights for your Domain" button on the Insights dashboard and adding the meta tag generated to the

section of the domain's root page. If the site uses subdomains, then the administrator must claim each subdomain's root file separately.

Facebook will soon discuss ways businesses can get more analytics information in a programmatic way, wrote Himel.